Ex-South Bay congressman on Libertarian’s list for high court

Former Rep. Tom Campbell, seen in 2009, made the Libertarian candidate’s high court short list.

Photo: Paul Sakuma, AP

Former South Bay Rep. Tom Campbell is on the short list for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. Of course, Libertarian Gary Johnson would have to win the presidency for that to happen, but hey, it’s something.

The former GOP legislator, now a law professor at Chapman University in Orange County, said he was honored by the unexpected notice from Johnson, former governor of New Mexico and a long shot in the November election.

“It was a very kind recognition,” Campbell told Law.com, a legal affairs website.

Campbell’s name has been showing up a lot in the political world in recent months, which isn’t a surprise. When he took the job as dean of Chapman’s law school in 2011, he agreed to stay out of the political whirl. But when he gave up his spot as dean earlier this year, that deal was off.

This month, for example, he was one of 30 Republican former members of Congress to sign a letter announcing their opposition to GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Campbell also has put out a plan he says would allow Republicans to avoid a repeat of their humiliation in this year’s U.S. Senate race in California, where a bunch of little-known and underfunded GOP candidates couldn’t keep a pair of Democrats from moving on to the November election.

“The vast number of California Republicans can unite behind a few very important principles, leaving the points that divide us to one side,” Campbell said in a letter to Republicans. “We need to find a candidate for governor in 2018 and support her or him strongly and early.”

Although Campbell has said he’s not looking to be that candidate, Republicans could do worse. The 64-year-old Illinois native has a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago and a law degree from Harvard, and he was a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Byron White.

He won a South Bay congressional seat in 1988 and served until he lost a 1992 primary run for Senate. He later served in the state Senate and then spent six more years in Congress, leaving when he lost the 2000 Senate race to Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein. Campbell also has been dean of the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and head of California’s Department of Finance.

Still, the Supreme Court ...

“I think it’s like being pope,” he said in the interview. “You say, ‘I am not worthy.’ Then you look to your left and right and say, ‘Hey, tell them I’m worthy.’”

— John Wildermuth

You’ve got mail: In a San Francisco supervisorial district with huge problems — including evictions, gentrification and tent encampments — email response time may seem pretty minor.

But it’s become a surprisingly big issue in the race to replace termed-out Supervisor David Campos in District Nine, which includes the Mission and Bernal Heights. Campos is backing Hillary Ronen, his legislative aide — but her challengers have made hay with assertions that Campos and Ronen ignore constituents’ emails and phone calls.

“This isn’t Fantasy Island, where you can pick and choose what you want to take credit for,” Joshua Arce, Ronen’s main challenger, said in a debate last week. He said Campos and Ronen focus on headline-grabbing issues at the expense of residents’ smaller concerns.

“The issue of responsiveness and failure to deliver is one of the defining issues in this race,” Arce said.

He’s got the vote of Kathy Sabatino, a Bernal Heights resident who said she repeatedly called, emailed and wrote letters to Campos’ office in frustration at parking tickets she was receiving for leaving her car in front of her own house.

“I didn’t get any response,” she said. “I honestly can’t even count how many times I wrote to Campos. I just gave up.”

Those who email Campos usually get an automatic reply that he can’t respond to every message. But Arce says that from what he hears, Campos never responds to anything.

Campos calls it “a fabricated thing” and said his office is “pretty responsive.”

“You have campaigns that are not doing very well, and they’re trying to grab something even if it’s not based on the facts,” Campos said.

The candidates were asked by an audience member in last week’s debate, “Will you return calls and emails?”